BlizzCon!

One of the great parts of living in Canada is that we're much closer to the rest of the world, where the fun stuff happens.  This year we decided we'd splurge (that doesn't sound like us at all!) and take a trip to BlizzCon!

BlizzCon is the annual conference run by Blizzard Entertainment, which is the company that makes World of Warcraft.  I've been playing World of Warcraft for 9 years now and Stephen's been playing it for around 6, so it's high time we went on the pilgrimage of our people.  We arranged tickets with a group of our guildmates, so in the end 3 of us from Toronto met up with 1 from LA and 1 from San Diego.  A full party!  Unfortunately we had 1 tank, 1 DPS and 3 healers, but that couldn't be helped (after all, the coolest people are healers).

BlizzCon is held in Anaheim, California, so we were looking forward to escaping the cold Toronto weather and seeing some sunshine for a few days too.  

We flew in late Thursday night for the convention start on Friday morning.  This is the queue at 7:30am - the convention actually started at 11am.  I do have a photo of the queue outside closer to the time but unfortunately my phone keeps freezing so I can't upload it.  

We waited in the queue and got some pretty good seats... where we waited another 90 minutes until the actual show started.

The main hall was huge - it's hard to get a sense of the scale, but this is one side of the hall, and it went all the way up to where the screens stop at the other end with chairs.  It went back a lot further than this as well.  There are a lot of nerds :)

Mike Morhaime (CEO of Blizzard Entertainment) at the lectern (and on the big screen)!  And then they announced the new expansion!

Statues around the Convention Center of Blizzard characters - here's Tyrael...

And Thrall riding a wolf...

Illidan!

And Kerrigan!

The WoW stage - complete with Dark Portal guarding statues on each side, which I thought were awesome.

A Lego Horde shield...

And Lego Thrall!

The demo machines for the new expansion - which we played for about 15 minutes the first time and about an hour the second time.  It was good fun although annoying not being able to play the roles we're used to - for example if you chose a druid, it gave you the option of being a cat or a tree, so Stephen couldn't tank for our dungeon group.  That was irritating.  Not to mention the awful keybindings!

A meeting stone IRL... unfortunately we couldn't summon any of our other friends or guildies.  I did try.

There was some pretty epic cosplay around - I really liked the fog beast.

  We think the one on the right is Tyrael but aren't sure who the one on the left is.  Anyone know?

Our guildie Darkmists getting into the spirit of the convention.  You no take candle!

A multitude of paladins with some awesome looking weapons.  The attention to details in these costumes is just phenomenal!

Hardware demo - imagine playing with this setup!  That's 3 screens wrapping around for nearly 180 degree view.  I wish!

Here's our group - yes, we made guild shirts for the occasion.  Hooray for us!

The convention was two days long, and we left each day totally exhausted after spending 9 hours watching panels and playing various demo games.  We had a great time - although in hindsight we made a number of common first-timer mistakes like not staying in the right hotel, arriving too late to go to any parties, not having internet access and not really meeting any new people because of these things.  Next time!